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Warmists: Urban heat island effect makes global warming worse on poor

And how will making electricity and air conditioning more expensive and less available help?

The Toronto Star reports:

Bike down a city street on a hot summer night until you pass a park and be rewarded with a blast of cool air.

This, in miniature and in reverse, is an easy way to understand what geographers and climatologists call the Urban Heat Island effect: even if a city and its rural surroundings receive the same amount of solar radiation, the city will be hotter.

But if the Urban Heat Island sounds simple, it masks a host of social thorny ramifications.

In Toronto, there is “almost a perfect overlay between poor areas and hot areas,” says Kevin Behan, deputy director of the Clean Air Partnership, an environmental group.

Mitigating the Urban Heat Island effect — which can be as easy as switching roof colours — is a matter of social justice, many experts say. And as climate change continues to amplify weather extremes, that task is increasingly urgent.

“During the summer, cities are getting a lot warmer,” says Hashem Akbari, an Urban Heat Island specialist at Concordia University in Montreal. “People need to have air conditioning, if they can afford it. If they cannot afford it, they pay for it in different ways” — with their health and sometimes with their lives.

So, for about two weeks, Toronto heats up a little. We’re talking about Toronto, for heaven’s sake, which has a brief summer to start with.
Urban Heat Island effect will catch two groups the most: the urban poor and the urban rich. The UHI effect is inevitable with construction available at this time or for the foreseeable future. It’s actually not part of “climate change” at all.
So the plan to help the poor is to make cities more dense, herd more people into them, and make energy less affordable while the UHI effect catches more victims. Good plan, that, on par with nearly all watermelon policy.

As a Torontonian,Ithink our fellow Junksters need some background info. Consider the source of this blarney The Toronto Star,or as we like to call it here, The “Red” Star,aaper of causes,and mouthpiece for the Provincial Lieberals,sorry, I meant Liberals. They hate our Mayor,Rob Ford and they dislike the Federal Government of Steven Harper the leader of the Conservative Party.But to the issue at hand. This article is Junk masquerading as science. The author uses the lefty theory of equating heat disparities with vthe lack of social justice. He says that the trees save 100 lives a year .Thus ,by extrapolation ,I figure if Toronto can plant just the right amount of trees each year, we might bring the Toronto moratlity rate down to zero! He states with obvious Mensa brilliance that we get warm in the summer.I can also state with Mensa brilliance that it is damn cold in Toronto in winter as well!If he claims that we should paint the asphalt white, the roofs white and everything else wite it would help in summer. Does this not mean then ,that we shouls repaint everything black again in winter? I will admit that in my travels through southern Spain , they have many whitewashed towns in Andalusia,but remember please that this is a Mediterranian climate we are talking about, not “The Great White North”.You should also be aware that when a” Heat Alert” is declared in Toronto the city opens” Cooling Stations” where people can go who have no A/C.Istill want this guy to send us a list of all the peoples’ lives that were saved!
Sorry for the long post but I feel better now.so I am going to lie in front of my A/C!

Personally, I think most of the so called global warming measured for the last century or so is in fact UHI effect. If collective action WERE able to reverse this, then the warmists would become coolists. Gotta roll with the flow, whichever direction, so long as the grants continue to hit the cash register.

Note the bike ride is at night….when UHI has impact. UHI does not make the days warmer, only the nights. It therefore impacts the average daily temps ((daytime high+nighttime low)/ 2), but not the daily high temps.